Britain bans the IRGC, but leaves Tehran a wide-open visa door - opinion

New UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham entered Downing Street earlier this month eager to repair Labor’s relationship with voters alienated by Gaza, so his apology for the party’s previous position was presented as a moral correction. It also addressed an obvious electoral wound: Labor lost heavily in Muslim-majority constituencies in 2024, while Gaza-focused independents defeated its candidates in several seats.

But Muslim voters are citizens, not a herd, and therefore any politician who treats them as one should be embarrassed. Yet Labor appears to have drawn precisely the wrong lesson from its losses. Rather than challenge the organized forces turning a foreign conflict into a test of communal loyalty, it seems determined to win those votes back by placing Israel in the dock. And the party’s timing is grotesque.

Burnham’s predecessor left office having designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Right as threats to British national security. Supporting or materially assisting either organization can now lead to a lengthy prison sentence. The designation finally acknowledged what had been obvious for years: Tehran’s campaign of intimidation and violence is already operating on British soil.

Yet the Home Office register still lists the Islamic Center of England as an approved sponsor for Skilled Worker, Minister of Religion and Religious Worker visas.

A sponsor license does not prove wrongdoing, nor does it mean that visas have recently been issued. But it does mean that the British state continues to authorize the organization to bring foreign workers into the country.

This is no obscure neighborhood mosque trapped in an administrative oversight. In 2021, the Foreign Office told Parliament that the Center and its director were the official religious representatives of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Britain. The Charity Commission later opened an inquiry after events held on the premises eulogized Qasem Soleimani, commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force. In 2025, the regulator found misconduct or mismanagement and ordered governance reforms. The Center’s constitutional requirement that one trustee serve as Khamenei’s official British representative was subsequently removed.

One arm of the British state identifies Khamenei’s guards as a national security threat. Another permits an institution historically tied to his office to sponsor foreign workers. Only the UK government could call this consistency.

The deeper failure, though, concerns anti-Zionism. Ministers denounce antisemitism in the abstract while shrinking from its most effective modern disguise. Criticism of Israeli policy is legitimate. The demand that Jews alone surrender sovereignty, self-defense and national legitimacy belongs to a different category.

Anti-Zionism has become the respectable dialect in which an ancient hatred now introduces itself on campuses, at demonstrations, and inside political parties.

Tehran understands its usefulness perfectly. It allows a theocratic regime that hangs dissidents, brutalizes women and arms foreign militias to pose as the champion of the oppressed. It binds Islamist agitation to sections of the radical Left and turns hostility toward Israel into a badge of moral sophistication.

The antisemite no longer needs to say “Jew.” He can say “Zionist,” preserve the meaning, and receive applause for his restraint.

Burnham may sincerely believe he is correcting Labor’s past mistakes. But he should ask who benefits when British policy treats Israel as the central problem while institutions shaped by Tehran retain official privileges.

The Home Office should suspend the Islamic Center of England’s sponsorship license pending a national security review. That review should extend to every organization with documented connections to hostile states, sanctioned officials or extremist propaganda.

Britain cannot designate the IRGC while leaving administrative side doors open to institutions once tethered to the authority that commands it.

The new Prime Minister now faces a simple test. Is antisemitism a national emergency, or merely an electoral inconvenience? Tehran will understand the answer.